Former XI player here, up to Aht Uhrgan. Compared to the battle classes, the restrictions placed on leveling the crafting classes always felt like it went against the spirit of the game and it was an aspect of the game that I often heard complaints about. In XI if you were serious about crafting you had alts so you could max out in everything.

Even if you weren't serious about crafting, you could just level a class to 100 you thought would benefit you the most. For the most part the recipes had very little overlap with the other crafting classes and relied much more on raw materials or refined materials from earlier levels of the same class. Barring a "sub-class" needing to be a certain level for higher level synths, there wasn't an incentive to level all the crafts on a single character.

XIV is a different system, and has always lauded itself about only needing one character to do everything. As early as level 1 you have recipes that require materials from other crafts. Each tier typically has materials from other crafts of the same level. You can't reliably make HQ items without using cross-class level 50 skills.

I think specializations are something that go against the design of the game and will ultimately ruin the markets. Look at the current desynth system for a precursor of this. There are items only obtainable by culinarian desynth--how expensive are those on your server? Granted, they're mostly glamour fodder, but the exclusivity/specialization has created that inflation.

With the zodiac materials, compare the cost of the weaver/ltw/gsm/bsm desynthed items to the arm/alc/cul/crp desynthed items. This is because most people take gsm/ltw/wvr due to needing the fieldcraft and mastercraft materia for crafting. It wasn't until more of those desynth skills could obtain these demimateria that the cost of fieldcraft dropped.

Specialization will just make synths that would normally be expensive even more so. It punishes players that not only enjoy the crafting aspect of the game, but have learned to expect to be able to do all the crafts on a single character.

I don't understand why the dev's just don't allow the time investment and cost of being an omnicrafter to be its own gating mechanism.